We all know about team selling, don’t we? Assembling your firm’s human assets to increase the chances of winning big deals is a survival skill in the major account world. But in engaging your selling team as effectively as possible, never neglect to focus on one of enterprise selling’s top challenges – team buying!
To understand the concept in the major accounts arena, think first about small and medium-sized businesses. In the SMB world, you often have the advantage of direct interaction with the prospect organization’s owner or president. With large accounts, on the other hand, the buyer networks are populated by individuals from throughout the organization. Purchasing is almost always involved as well as legal, accounting and other departments, depending on the size or importance of the purchase being considered.
So, how important is it to understand the buying team in a major pursuit? Truthfully, it’s often the difference between winning or losing. As a result, the selling team absolutely must know and strategize for the buying team composition in every major pursuit. Understanding the authority, the interactions and how decisions are made are survival skills. What you don’t know can hurt you. Really hurt you.
In considering buying teams, selling teams typically focus on buyers in terms of the individuals and their functions. That’s very important, of course, but knowing the functional roadmap also requires building a comprehensive understanding of all the meaningful connections and the impactful interrelationships. Do individual departments have favorites or biases against specific types of offerings? For example, would finance or accounting prefer compliance-oriented solutions while marketing would opt for more creative choices? And what about the impacts of how the various departments interact with each other? Does legal have a good working relationship with sales or do they view them with malice? How about procurement and finance? Do they try to one-up each other or do they work together smoothly? All critical questions that need to be understood. But at the end of the day, as is often the case in the world of selling, it’s all about people. That’s why we have the famous mantra, isn’t it? “People Buy from People”. Each buying contact is a person, affected in their choices by their own personal likes, dislikes, priorities, pains and goals. Affected, truthfully, by what matters most to them, just as you and I are in making our own important personal decisions. And these people dynamics increase the complexity in major account deals, which are already complicated enough. Dismiss these people issues at your own peril for they must be clearly understood and accounted for in both your tactics and strategy. Fortunately, there’s a powerful tool you can put in play to help you understand the people issues with buying teams – DISC.
As stated, “People Buy from People” means that these individual buyers are, of course, real people. And understanding the behavioral profiles of real people dictates our ability to communicate successfully with them. Enter DISC, the personality assessment process that provides valuable insights into individual behavioral strengths and weaknesses to help chart a path to effectively communicating with different styles of people. Going back to our SMB example, the challenge is to understand and communicate with typically only one or two buyers. In large accounts, the buying team multiplies the people problem. In DISC lexicon, is the buying center attorney a “D” – dominant? Is the accounting manager a “C” – compliant? What about the operations manager – an “I” – influencer? The vast number of buyers certainly complicates the analysis but as with the functions, the interactions among the individual profiles are also critical. Identifying and adapting to the variety of styles increases communication clarity and helps you build an effective action plan to help increase your chances of winning.
And after you’ve performed quality preparation in market, territory and account planning along with practical Go/No-Go processes, team selling itself becomes a real key to success. For when your teammates are truly engaged, you earn the right to put DISC alignment in play. For your colleagues bring their DISC profiles to the table as well, allowing you to align them with buying team counterparts. Functionally matching technology with technology, legal with legal and finance with finance often makes sense but the real magic often comes with the alignment of personality styles via DISC. For DISC-compatible pairs communicate better because they speak the same language in the same way. Ducks with ducks, as they say! And actively DISC-engaging your colleagues with individual prospects is extremely valuable in another way. For exposing the account to the multi-faceted substance of your organization highlights the very wide value you’ll bring after you’ve won the business. Show your value early and often!
Team buying exposes selling teams to intelligent businesspeople who come prepared. And while the individual buyers exhibit different functional and behavioral frames of reference, they all have one thing in common. They are subject matter experts in the business of the account whose business you’re working hard to win. So put the alignment of team buying with team selling in play in your major account deals. And create a truly powerful competitive advantage.
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